


ours was the word and ours was the way

by eneiryu



Series: in the shadow of the valley but don't need light to see [3]
Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: M/M, thiampride2020
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-24
Updated: 2020-06-24
Packaged: 2021-03-03 21:15:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,837
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24902185
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eneiryu/pseuds/eneiryu
Summary: “I didnot,” Liam hisses, “free us from the Doctors just to keephiding.”
Relationships: Liam Dunbar/Theo Raeken
Series: in the shadow of the valley but don't need light to see [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1682011
Comments: 20
Kudos: 114





	ours was the word and ours was the way

**Author's Note:**

  * For [LI0NH34RT](https://archiveofourown.org/users/LI0NH34RT/gifts).



> For the ever-lovely [LI0NH34RT](https://archiveofourown.org/users/LI0NH34RT/pseuds/LI0NH34RT) for [The Thiam Pride Month Gift Exchange](https://officialthiamlibrary.tumblr.com/post/619907645104701440/were-back-welcome-to-the-thiam-pride-month-gift).
> 
> And for everyone else, an immensely happy Pride.

They’re in another little nothing motel room, in another little nothing town, when Liam hears it.

He’s wrapped around Theo on top of the room’s sagging mattress, underneath the bed’s threadbare comforter. He’s pressed up tight to Theo’s back, his arm looped around Theo’s waist, and when he lifts his head, confused, to better hear the low-grade commotion from outside on the street, his nose brushes the back of Theo’s neck. Theo shivers. 

Liam presses a kiss to the skin he’d disturbed, and carefully climbs out of bed after Theo settles.

There’s a lumpy armchair by the room’s sole window. Liam kneels backwards on it as he twitches open the curtains, and looks out. 

The asphalt of the street and the concrete of the sidewalks are filled with less cars, and more people, than they should be. Liam tilts his head, and catches sight of the white flyers posted on little sticks set in the grass by the road: _temporary no parking_. There’s a date, _today’s_ date, and a reason listed. Liam feels his expression slacken with surprise. He looks a little harder at the people milling around, who now that he’s really _looking_ , are milling—if they’re really milling, at all—with purpose.

And then he jumps, just slightly, when Theo suddenly slides in next to him to the side of the armchair, one hand rising to pull the curtain a little further back so that he can see, too. Liam watches Theo instead of the scene, noting how his eyes flicker over the same things Liam’s had, drawing the same conclusions. 

“Huh,” he rasps, his voice still rough with sleep. “I’d forgotten all about that.”

Liam snorts. “Wouldn’t have thought a backwater town like this had it in it.”

Theo’s answering smile is a little small; a little secret. Liam stares at it, caught. Theo shrugs, after a second, his eyes still on the street. He goes to let the curtain fall back down.

Liam catches it, instead. Theo gives him a strange look, and then visibly lets it go. He turns back to the room as he says, “Either way, we should get out of town before it really gets started. That many people out on the street, we shouldn’t risk—”

Liam cuts him off. “We should go.”

Theo freezes, and then jerks his head around to stare at him. “ _What?_ ”

Liam just clenches his jaw. “We should go,” he repeats stubbornly.

Theo looks completely dumbfounded. The absoluteness of his surprise solidifies the resoluteness in Liam’s chest; hardens it into a diamond-hard thing. He holds his ground as Theo comes back towards him. Slow, like he’s approaching a wild animal.

“Liam,” he says, clearly trying for _reasonable_. “We _can’t_ go. There’ll be too many people. We’re still in the middle of Storo pack territory, if they _see_ us—”

“What are they going to do?” Liam cuts him off derisively. “Kill us in the middle of the street?”

But Theo just retorts, “They _might_.” His eyes search Liam’s face, disbelief and confusion and the barest beginnings of _concern_ in his eyes. “Jesus, Liam. Have you forgotten what the Doctors _did_ to them? What _we_ ,” he adds, pointedly, “did to them?”

Liam jerks his head to the side, away from Theo’s searching stare. He works his jaw. He considers the stubbornness in his chest, and the way that it’s twisting and turning and threatening to become something else. He looks back at Theo.

“I’m going,” he decides.

“Liam—” Theo tries, one last time. He says it while reaching for Liam, like he was going to gentle Liam through some kind of fit, or episode. 

Liam feels that _something else_ in his chest ignite right into anger.

He gets his own hand wrapped around Theo’s outstretched wrist, and uses it to yank him in, and then spin him around, shoving him up against the stretch of wall next to the window as Liam comes off the armchair, and follows him forward; pinning him. He meets Theo’s wide, surprised eyes with his own; can feel the way that his own expression is all twisted up, something raw threatening to show from underneath it.

“I did _not_ ,” Liam hisses, “free us from the Doctors just to keep _hiding_.” He glares at Theo, daring him to argue. “I am _done_ hiding.”

Theo is barely breathing. Liam can tell, because they’re pressed together thigh to chest. The anger in Liam’s chest cracks right along with his furious expression, and he brings his hands up to cradle Theo’s face. 

“Be done with me,” he pleads, his fingers stroking over Theo’s cheeks, his brows, the soft surprised shape of his mouth. He closes his eyes, and drops his forehead against Theo’s own. “Be done with me.”

He can feel it when Theo closes his own eyes; Theo’s eyelashes brush his cheeks. His hands come up to hold Liam’s face in turn.

After a second, he nods.

\---

They could go in any of the clothes they already own—that’s the _point_ , isn’t it, to not have to dress up, or strip down, or be anything other than what you _are_ —but Liam, suddenly, wants to embrace the thing fully; he wants to be _in it_.

He wants _Theo_ to be in it with him.

He’d memorized the layout of the town before they’d even crossed into its borders two days ago, which is how he knows that there’s a department store not far from their motel. He leaves Theo in the room, in the shower—a sacrifice, certainly, but worth it—and heads towards it.

He makes a pit stop along the way.

The Doctors had never needed money, not with the forces that they had at their command, and their ability to bend reality—to bend people’s _minds_ —to their will had meant that Theo and Liam hadn’t really, either. But Liam had always coveted it anyway; had hoarded it when he could. It’s what had allowed him to buy Theo the pastries at coffee shops that he never could do a good enough job at pretending he didn’t want, or the subscriptions to all the streaming services—cash loaded up onto prepaid cards purchased at drug stores, and gas stations, and rundown grocery marts—so that he and Theo could sit in something other than the dark while they waited, and waited, and waited for orders.

Now, he sets himself up on a bench by a breakfast place, the patio area already teeming with tipsy brunch-goers, and lays back across the weathered wood like a sulky teenager, his eyes fixed backwards a dozen or so yards down the street. He waits.

A young woman parks a stroller with a slumbering baby nearby the ATM, and snags the back of the collar of a younger, toddling child before the child can run off, before she digs through her purse to pull out a frayed and well-worn wallet. Liam stays where he is. Next there’s a student bearing a hoodie from the local community college, who spends a moment staring at the ATM’s screen with their lip between their teeth before they make their selection, and take their cash and go. Liam doesn’t move to stand, though he kicks his legs a little idly through the air, laconic, relaxed; ignorable.

A luxury sedan rolls up just in front of the ATM, parking illegally, and a besuited man steps out, already talking loudly into a phone held up to his ear. Liam lets his head fall back down flat, and smirks up at the sky, and pushes himself to his feet.

The man pulls out two-hundred dollars in cash. When Liam pickpockets him on the man’s way back to his illegally-parked car, he only takes the top three bills of the folded-up bunch. Sixty bucks. An annoyance, but for someone wearing that expensive of a suit, not one worth pursuing. Maybe he’d bitch about it to whoever was on the other line, Liam thinks, tucking the cash into his pocket as he smiles charmingly and apologizes for his clumsiness. 

Maybe he wouldn’t even notice.

It’s early enough that the department store, when Liam reaches it, has only a handful of other people inside. Still, Liam’s careful as he weaves his way through the aisles, mindful of Theo’s earlier warning. He can’t smell any werewolves or other supernaturals around, but the Storo pack has human members, he knows, and they certainly had _friends_. 

But he doesn’t see anyone he recognizes, or who look like they recognize _him_. Instead what he sees, flicking through the shirts and pants and other clothes on display, are the perfect outfits. He grins, and yanks his choices down from the racks, and heads for the front of the store.

“Hey,” Theo calls, when Liam gets back to the motel. 

The room is still humid with steam from Theo’s shower and saturated with Theo’s scent because of it, and Liam feels a reflexive tightening in his gut as he catches a mouthful of it, and breathes it in _deep_. He grins at Theo, who’s laid out on the bed with a book in hand, and doesn’t fight the urge he has to leap onto the bed—to _get closer_ —immediately afterwards. Theo squawks but makes room for him, jerking his book up and to the side to safety, before he tosses it gently onto the nightstand, and brings his hands back to Liam’s hips, Liam now sitting astride Theo’s own.

“You get whatever the hell it was you were looking for?” Theo wonders, more than a little dryly. 

Liam just smirks, and waggles the bag—the plastic handles looped around his fingers—at Theo. Theo frowns, and reaches for it. Liam waits as Theo digs through it, anticipation curling low in his gut. He’s not disappointed when Theo gives him an incredulous look. 

“Liam,” he states disbelievingly, and looks back at the black, artfully ripped jeans he’d pulled out. “You can’t be—” He starts. “These are _at least_ a size too small.”

“Nah,” Liam disagrees, and darts in to kiss him. “They’ll fit _just right_ ,” he counters, _suggestion_ layered thick in his voice, and he takes it a step further by pressing Theo down, down into the mattress as Liam _rolls_ his hips against Theo’s own. “Trust me,” he murmurs against Theo’s lips. 

Theo stares up at him through glazed eyes, and then swallows. Liam grins again, and then rolls off of him to go take his own shower.

Theo’s dressed by the time he gets out, and he looks as good as Liam knew he would. The jeans are sinfully tight but they just accentuate the definition of his thighs, his calves. His _ass_ , which Liam can’t resist grabbing and then using that same grip to haul Theo in against himself, kissing him hard, and deep. 

“Jesus, Liam,” Theo pants out, pulling back after a second. “There’s absolutely _no room_ in these jeans for the situation you’re about to start.” 

He shoves Liam lightly back, and steps back himself as he smooths down his now-rumpled shirt. It’s just a plain white tank but it’s tight, too, edged in black around the arms and collar and waist and with thin enough fabric that Liam can see the barest suggestion of his dusky—and hardening—nipples. Theo flicks his eyes up to Liam’s, his expression a little tense. Liam just lets his grin curl into something softer.

“You look good,” he tells Theo honestly. 

Theo rolls his eyes, but he also flushes some, and he turns away to hide that fact as he swipes a black baseball hat off of the bed, and slides it backwards onto his head. “Whatever,” he mutters, but his pulse had skipped, and Liam’s soft smile widens right back into a grin. “Are you going to get ready, or not?”

The noise outside their motel room has grown from a low-grade commotion to a low-grade _roar_ by the time they actually leave. Liam rolls his shoulders in his own new shirt—plain white, like Theo’s, but with short sleeves because he likes the way they show off his biceps, and the shape and suggestion of his back—and turns to smirk at Theo. Theo looks back, and then his expression goes dry, and he shakes his head.

“You’re way too proud of yourself right now,” he comments, low and under his breath and the fondness in it just for Liam’s ears. 

“Right,” Liam agrees. “That’s the _point_.” And then he grabs Theo’s wrist, and yanks him towards the crush of people already making their slow, winding, chaotic ways past them on the street.

Liam’s never been to a parade—at least not that he can _remember_ , though considering his former _employers_ , that was never a guarantee—and he’s certainly never been to a parade like _this_ , chock full of colorful people—both literally and figuratively—and with an infectious kind of energy just _swamping_ the whole ordeal; weighty enough to almost be a physical thing that Liam breathes in, and out. It makes him yank harder at Theo’s wrist, pull him faster towards the crowd. 

It makes him turn and _kiss_ Theo right as they reach the edge of the parade, and all around them a massive _cheer_ goes up.

Theo laughs against his mouth, breathy and startled, and when he pulls back he’s still laughing, his expression wide open and a little _awed_. Liam grins at him, something in his chest cracking wide open in response, and when hands reach for them to pull them into the middle of the parade, he goes.

He goes, and Theo follows.

They lose each other a few times in the chaos. There’s just so many _people_ , pressed so tightly together across the cramped space of the width of the street, and ordinarily Liam thinks his instincts would be _howling_ , but instead they’re—inundated. With laughter and singing and the close physical sensation of hundreds of individual lungs _breathing_ , the sound of it almost melding into a single solitary breath; like the parade and everybody in it were part of one body, one _life_. Liam shuts his eyes and breathes with it, and opens his eyes and breathes with it, and finds Theo’s eyes across the way and _breathes with it_.

Theo shudders out an exhale when their eyes lock, and Liam feels it in his own lungs.

He dances, fast and filthy, with whoever presses themselves up against him. He dances, slow and smooth, when the beat of the music changes. But while all around him there are bodies coming together and breaking apart, no one tries to kiss him, or skate their hands too low. Instead, in waves, the crowd pushes him back towards Theo, or returns Theo to him, like the crowd itself knew where he and Theo belonged.

The next time it happens, there’s a colorful flag drawn on Theo’s cheek. Liam grins at the sight of it and presses his mouth sloppily to its edge, tasting wax and sweat and Theo’s skin. He presses his whole _body_ up closer when Theo shivers in response.

It’s hours later by the time they stumble out of the parade, sun-drunk and sweaty and just _gasping_ for air, half-laughing as they collapse down on a free stretch of cool grass on the side of one of the streets. The parade rolls on past them and Liam salutes it sloppily, flat on his back with his shirt practically _glued_ to his skin with moisture, Theo flat on his stomach beside him in the same state. And so Liam can’t help it—he rolls over so that he’s half-covering Theo, and kisses him, pressing him hard into the earth. He stays pressed up against him even once he lets the kiss slow, and fade, until finally they’re just laying side-by-side, breathing the same air. 

Theo looks at him, eyes hooded and mouth soft. The flag on his cheek is smudged, either from the heat or Liam’s mouth or both, and Liam brings a hand up to cup Theo’s jaw, and brush his thumb over the shape of it. Theo closes his eyes, and turns into the touch.

When he opens them again, there’s something harder to them, to the line of his mouth. He looks straight at Liam again. Liam can feel Theo’s jaw clench under the hand he still has curled around it. He waits.

“Okay,” Theo says, each syllable distinct; firm; steeled. “Okay.” He brings his own hand up and curves it around Liam’s jaw in turn. “No more hiding,” he says.

He _promises_.

Liam’s mouth splits in a wide, helpless grin. He surges forward, and _covers_ Theo’s body with his own, rolling him over onto his back and pinning him there as he kisses him, and kisses him, and kisses him. He only pulls back when he runs out of air, when he can feel Theo do the same. He doesn’t go far.

Just far enough, in fact, to meet Theo’s eyes, and promise in turn:

“No more hiding.”


End file.
